Advanced agentic intelligence is a prerequisite for deploying Large Language Models in practical, real-world applications. Diverse real-world APIs demand precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. The breadth of function-calling competence is closely tied to the diversity of environments in which agents are trained. In this work, we scale up environments as a step towards advancing general agentic intelligence. This gives rise to two central challenges: (i) how to scale environments in a principled manner, and (ii) how to effectively train agentic capabilities from experiences derived through interactions with these environments. To address these, we design a scalable framework that automatically constructs heterogeneous environments that are fully simulated, broadening the space of function-calling scenarios. We further adapt a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy: first endowing agents with fundamental agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. Extensive experiments on agentic benchmarks, -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench, demonstrate that our trained model, AgentScaler, significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with dynamically changing knowledge and handling unknown static information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is employed to tackle these challenges and has a significant impact on improving LLM performance. In fact, we find that not all questions need to trigger RAG. By retrieving parts of knowledge unknown to the LLM and allowing the LLM to answer the rest, we can effectively reduce both time and computational costs. In our work, we propose a Knowledge Boundary Model (KBM) to express the known/unknown of a given question, and to determine whether a RAG needs to be triggered. Experiments conducted on 11 English and Chinese datasets illustrate that the KBM effectively delineates the knowledge boundary, significantly decreasing the proportion of retrievals required for optimal end-to-end performance. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of KBM in three complex scenarios: dynamic knowledge, long-tail static knowledge, and multi-hop problems, as well as its functionality as an external LLM plug-in.

Despite the advancements made in Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs), like text Large Language Models (LLMs), they have limitations in addressing questions that require real-time information or are knowledge-intensive. Indiscriminately adopting Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques is an effective yet expensive way to enable models to answer queries beyond their knowledge scopes. To mitigate the dependence on retrieval and simultaneously maintain, or even improve, the performance benefits provided by retrieval, we propose a method to detect the knowledge boundary of VLLMs, allowing for more efficient use of techniques like RAG. Specifically, we propose a method with two variants that fine-tune a VLLM on an automatically constructed dataset for boundary identification. Experimental results on various types of Visual Question Answering datasets show that our method successfully depicts a VLLM’s knowledge boundary, based on which we are able to reduce indiscriminate retrieval while maintaining or improving the performance. In addition, we show that the knowledge boundary identified by our method for one VLLM can be used as a surrogate boundary for other VLLMs. Code will be released at https://github.com/Chord-Chen-30/VLLM-KnowledgeBoundary